Endless Boogie: Long Island

Endless Boogie
Long Island
No Quarter

Endless Boogie are not a band given to nuance and introspection. Thet call themselves Endless Boogie, for God’s sake, and the name is apt. The opening track to their third album in five years, Long Island, is titled “The Savageist” and runs thirteen and a half minutes –roughly all of which are spent in full-meltdown molten guitar-riff mode. Want more? Here’s “The Artemus Ward” and “Imprecations”, both of which run for exactly 9:17, but are otherwise profoundly different. “Artemus” is a slow burner whose downtempo noodlings and reverbed licks and vocals gradually achieve a state of trancelike spaceyness, while “Imprecations” is a workmanlike stomper, all fuzz pedal and wah-wah, that’s about as subtle as a trio of jackhammers. Fourteen-minute album closer “The Montgomery Manuscript” is another exercise in endlessness that comes damn close to succeeding, one righteous solo at a time. With just eight tunes totalling close to 80 minutes, Long Island is that rarest of albums, the self-indulgently overlong set that never wears out its welcome.

There are vocals in there somewhere, but they’re all but irrelevant and you can barely make them out, anyway. What matters here is the guitar assault, which is varied enough from tune to tune to avoid monotony (a problem on the band’s 2008 debut Focus Level). Make no mistake, Endless Boogie are all about the guitar, and listeners uninterested in full-throttle riffage are likely to be yawning halfway through the first song. For the rest of us, though, the band is a treasure, and this record is among their strongest. Long live rawk, lads.

RATING 8 / 10